Unfortunately, I've seen an alternative that isn't much better. Google has separate management and SWE tracks, but tries to promote SWEs to management. It's pr

Unfortunately, I've seen an alternative that isn't much better. Google has separate management and SWE tracks, but tries to promote SWEs to management. It's pretty disastrous: people who fundamentally just want to be writing code burn their day on performance reviews and people issues (resolving a database latency issue is not nearly as fun as figuring out who's going to resolve it because the database guy's mom just died, and he'll be out... Shit, we don't know, his mom just died, it's on a spectrum of "he'll be back in a week" to "he'll be changing careers," it's not up to the manager). The end result is that people who want to do good work are managed by people who are ill-trained and ill-temperamented to enable them to do good work, and it can make for a pretty miserable experience. There are exceptions, but the exceptions usually come from the process finding the rare superhuman who's extremely competent in (and fulfilled by) both arenas. The best managers at Google cared deeply about systems and deeply about their teams, and they were rare to find (and usually ended up at the top of an org chart where they could do the most good, so rarely were the direct boss for a SWE II or SWE III).